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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28926021">and so the attic sings</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianbirds/pseuds/lesbianbirds'>lesbianbirds</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>character studies [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Canon-Typical The Corruption Content (The Magnus Archives), Character Study, Dermatillomania, Gen, Religious Imagery &amp; Symbolism, micheal and oliver appear for a few lines, so is the ant guy but he’s filtered heavily through jane’s eyes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 13:21:00</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,924</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28926021</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianbirds/pseuds/lesbianbirds</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jane Prentiss was never, in the traditional sense, a person. Instead she was a house, eaten away at and lived in.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>character studies [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1965208</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>and so the attic sings</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this sure was something i wrote! warnings for canon-typical corruption imagery, allusions to parental abuse, allusions to unhealthy relationships, and worms.</p><p>thank you to my beta hecate, who you can find at @drumkonwords on tumblr, for making this readable.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Jane Prentiss should really stop calling herself that, because Jane Prentiss is dead and never existed. Instead, she </span>
  <span>is a figure of a woman drawn in too-heavy lines. That’s the ugliest thing about her,</span>
  <span> the way she stands thick and bold whenever she tries to look at herself in the mirror.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane Prentiss is mostly worms, in that she’s like the Ship of Theseus but with worms, a study in how much of humanity you can replace until it’s all just rot. This is better than ants, which scurry in a way that worms do not. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She stepped on an anthill once. Deliberately, a little tipsy and feeling bitter. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Someone once told Jane that to love someone is to build them a home. They didn’t specify what from, so Jane turns her bones into foundations and her veins into hallways and her heart into a manor. This proves definitively that she is loved, you see, because it is easier to be loved when you turn yourself into the loved-thing, when you remould your flesh into a mirror image.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was the same someone who drank wine with her in the park, braiding her hair and telling her she should be braver. It had been such a pleasant sensation, their laughter in her ear as they told stories that sounded only half-true, nails scratching faintly against her scalp. They had been good at braiding too, said that they used to do it for their sister, said that she had such beautiful hair. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They’d gotten scared off eventually, and Jane had been alone. She is not alone anymore.She is not really a thing anymore, just a hollowed out vessel. Like a moth-eaten coat, still worn because of some lingering attachment. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane certainly feels eaten away at, as she sits picking worms off her flowers and mumbling soft reassurances to the worms that squirm through her skin. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It is an odd thing, to be consumed. Jane doesn’t think much of it, because Jane doesn’t think much. But that’s only because Jane doesn’t do much of anything, because Jane isn’t much of anything, just the hollowed out bones of something burnt. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Not purified, not holy, but left to rot in her own ashes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane doesn’t do much about this, because Jane doesn’t exist. This is definitively because Jane is a facade of a thing, because she loves like a house on fire and like she is a house, all welcoming doors and loving arms. Her love enfolds, her love consumes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But then again, Jane Prentiss doesn’t exist, so factually speaking, that is untrue.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But if Jane Prentiss did exist, she would be filled with the kind of rot that you can’t scrub off, can’t squeeze out or ignore.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’s tried, in the repetitive kind of way that means your actions aren’t really your own, in the kind of way that means a line needs to be drawn between </span>
  <em>
    <span>brain </span>
  </em>
  <span>and </span>
  <em>
    <span>body</span>
  </em>
  <span>. In the kind of way that feels like her hands are being pulled jerkily about by her own crawling neuroses. </span>
</p><p>*</p><p>
  <span>Jane Prentiss got teased for her trypophobia in high school. She got teased for a lot of things, but it was just kid-teasing, harmless and funny. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Besides, it’s not like she didn’t have friends. She did, of course she did, because held on to them tight so they wouldn’t leave without the imprints of her fingers on them.<br/>
</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She always holds on tight, wrapping around people like she wished she had more limbs to hold them with. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her girlfriend, years later, will tell her that she’s clingy. That’s she’s obsessed with being the perfect </span>
  <em>
    <span>something</span>
  </em>
  <span>, that she tries too hard to be loved. It’s the same girlfriend that never called her beautiful, never really let herself be loved, not in the all-consuming kind of way. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane killed someone once, nearby their old college. Killed is the wrong word though; blessed, maybe. Gifted with the promise of becoming something lived-in, something full of cramped spaces and dark spots where she can be burrowed into a hollowed out. Filled up with love, like knees on wooden floors and hands clasped in prayer. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Parasites make their home in bodies and gift them in that way, letting them give the breath in their lungs so that they can be useful, can be loved.</span>
</p><p>Jane’s mother had always told her that being useful is the same as being loved. That if you don’t make yourself into a mirror image of those you love you will be left behind.</p><p>
  <span>She didn’t tell her outright. But it was implied. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane hadn’t been useful before. Jane had been scrambling to pay rent and becoming flimsier every day, a see-through thing. She had hurt, in all the spaces she had not yet let become rotted, aches from old broken bones and paper cuts. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once, she'd met someone who made a mockery of skeletons. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The way he’d moved had reminded her of broken bones, but when he smiled she became convinced of the humanity of him. Nothing inhuman could smile so convincingly and lie so easily after all, and that in itself was probably another trick. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The man with fractals in his throat had told her that it was easy to let patterns hypnotise you. Jane can agree with that at least, in the way she can watch the worms eat through her skin and play connect-the-dots with the holes left behind. She liked the way he looked wavy, the way his skin broke in pixelated honeycombs just when she let her guard down. They captivated her in the way holes always had, fascinating her with the twist in her gut and the crawling thing in her throat. </span>
</p><p>The man with fractals on his skin had been consumed too. She doesn’t get why he’s so torn up about it. He was useful, after all. He was loved. He wasn’t real anymore, but something cradled and used as a puppet, wooden eyes and silken strings. </p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>Jane had always wanted something bigger than her, something purer and more important that she could love without reserves. </p><p>
  <span>You can make a home out of a crypt, you see, can fill your mouth with dirt and let all the living things that twist and crawl make use of you. You can let yourself love the squirming things, the rotting things, that eat their way through what they love. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It’s an odd thing, to be consumed. It starts with an itch.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane used to get made fun of for her habits, her little compulsions. The way she ordered her pencils one by one, yes, but also the way she showed up with red marks on her face and rashes across her wrists. The way she let herself slip into the magic of thinking that if she just did this one thing everything would be okay.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The day she sawed through the padlock of the attic door was not the first day she cried in helplessness at her own cracked and bleeding palms. It was not the first day she had let herself be calmed by the rhythmic motions, the sting of pain.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It is the first time it didn’t come with soap and a desperate prayer on her lips to let the rot wash off of her, to let all her picking squeeze the impurity out of her. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Mostly what Jane had been teased about in high school was the insects. Her fascination with them, the way she hoarded facts about parasites and mosquitos and tucked them close to her chest. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>There’s nothing in her chest now. There are a thousand things in her chest. It’s easier than when there was a fragile heart and lingering eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>(She used to wish that someone would dig her heart out of her chest, holding it bloody and beating in their hands and love her for it. She understands now that it would be better if she had instead wished for them to sink their teeth into it, to let them consume her into a greater whole.)</span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane Prentiss was a house and then she was a home; first came the sketches of a happy family, of wine-drunk laughter in the park, and then came the love. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane Prentiss got called names those days in the park. Got called clingy and compulsive and toxic, like she was killing them, like she was leaving black sludge in their veins. Like she was wrong for offering everything for them and expecting the same in return. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Like she hadn’t tried to build herself a house out of her ribs and a home in the marrow of her bones. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane Prentiss doesn’t love right, so it’s a good thing that Jane Prentiss doesn’t exist, that Jane Prentiss is just a warm dark place for all the squirming rotting things. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It hurts, their love. Physically speaking that is, because it’s a blessing, to have the sting of them in her flesh as a reminder that they are here. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She felt it when they first crawled into her arm, when they left their flimsy paper home for </span>
  <em>
    <span>her</span>
  </em>
  <span>. The thrill of it, the needle-sharp pain of it, makes her feel more alive than ever. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Technically speaking, she might be dead. </span>
  <span>But she is filled with living things, and this makes her something better.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The attic is not the centre of the house, not really, but it’s the head of it, the place where dark things hide. Quiet. Warm. Mouldy, if you’re lucky, full of squirming things and skittering, many-legged things. Cobwebbed and wrapped up. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane Prentiss used to do something. Anything. Sit by the Thames and think of drinking it, of letting herself become diseased and rotting. This was her inevitable state after all; a home for something squirming.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her movements aren’t her only, not really, but they are her choice, in that every choice the great squirming thing that lives in her chest is her own. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane never really thought of herself as beautiful before she saw the insides of her own flesh rotted and squirming. The red dress suits her, though.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane’s own </span>
  <em>
    <span>filth </span>
  </em>
  <span>has itched under her skin since she could register her presence. She used to try to avoid it, to dodge and twist and scrub at cracked and bleeding skin. This is easier though, a homecoming she’d tried so desperately, uselessly to avoid. </span>
</p><p>Her and the dirt. Her and the many-legged squirming things which nest inside her mouth and crawl down her throat. </p><p>
  <span>She was a lonely kid. She isn’t lonely anymore. This lack-of makes the worms vastly preferable, their burrowing, twisting pain a reminder that they are there, that they have made a home in her flesh and bone and mouth. That their love is a greater thing which she is bathed in, an acceptance of what has always crawled along her bones and ran along her teeth. <br/>
</span>
</p><p>When she was a teenager, she used to go without showering for long periods of time, when the exhaustion weighed on her like a physical thing. Before she used to be disgusted at herself for this, scratching at her skin and scalp like thorns rest on her forehead and lice crawl in her hair.</p><p>When she was a teenager, she used to pick at the acne on her face until there was blood under fingernails and scars on her face. When she was a teenager she used to watch worms crawl up from the dirt up from the rain, head bent so the ugly red welts on her face couldn’t be seen. <br/>
<br/>
She had been repulsed by herself, how she kept on picking even as she grew up, pulling at ingrown hairs and spots and all the little imperfections that kept her from being loved. </p><p>
  <span>Now she recognises that it is so much better to let the dirt cover her skin and gather under her nails. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>(Jane is a graveyard, Jane is a garden, Jane is a beautiful thing.)</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She is not human. She is not living, not in the way humans are living. Not in the way flowers are living, straining desperately upwards for a taste of something greater, something that will fill the curving hunger in their stomachs. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She got that taste of something greater. She doesn’t have to starve anymore. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The thing is, Jane was never really real, even when she was watching her skin redden and crack under her scrubbing. She was just a performance so obviously false it became real; paper mache into wood, blueprints into a house. Red dress, red eyes, red staining her skin in streaks from where the worms burrowed and burrowed and left emptiness behind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Even now Jane is found wanting, not warm enough, not welcoming enough. Even now when there are wriggling squirming things nesting in her she is not fully consumed. She exists, in a way, she has thoughts that are ripped from her head and considered, thoughts of uneasiness and individuality, of cobwebs and spiders in her throat. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane sits outside a lonely man’s door and aches to show him what it is like to be useful, to be a home. She types out texts bit by bit, clumsy and unused to the rules of social convention she has long since shed. </span>
</p><p>It would be easier for him if he opened the door and welcomed her inside the moulding, rotting wood of his apartment. If he let her show him what it is like to be wanted, to turn your hands into a refuge, into a shelter built of warm flesh and itching bones.</p><p>
  <span>But that’s beside the point. The point is that Jane has learned to love filth, to long for the squirming things that had once repulsed her. She has learned to let stagnant water into her lungs, to let her skin hand bloated and moulded from her bones. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>*</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The tunnels under the institute were the only palpable place for her, really, the darkness of them and the dirt that soon caked her skin and coated her teeth. It cloaked her and comforted her, like the blanket her mother had given her once. It had been a ratty old thing by then, but it had kept her warm when her mother had left. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane didn’t have to see her own flesh in those tunnels. The only thing she could see was the silver-quick flash of the worms burrowing in and out of her flesh. She did not have to look at the honeycomb of her skin. She did not have to feel that shudder of revulsion of seeing those holes in her own skin, the nagging sense of sickness. It was irrational to be disgusted by the reminder of her own love. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>When she opens her mouth, worms spill from her lips like blood and she has no voice other than what the Hive gives her. It’s better than all the lies she used to tell, whispering </span>
  <em>
    <span>I’m loved, I’m loved, I’m loved </span>
  </em>
  <span>like saying it thrice would make it real.</span>
</p><p>It’s such a fucking blessing to give herself over to the control of some greater, loving thing. It’s the only kind of worship she could stand; the kind that made a church from her ribs and stained glass windows of her eyes. The kind that let her worship, properly worship, and not just perform half-desperate rituals by the slow, stagnant waters of a filthy river.</p><p>
  <span>Some days Jane felt like she was drowning, like some great pressure was smothering her. That the dirt that filled her mouth was choking her, that the worms that lived in her flesh were suffocating her, their song filling her ears so she could hardly hear her own thoughts.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’d gone to a concert with that type of music once, trying to please some long-forgotten friend of a friend. The music had filled her head-to-toe, had buzzed in her fingertips and made her lose herself for once, letting her become one of many moving, shapeless bodies. That was what the Hive’s love was like, too-loud and overwhelming.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was the kind of love that did not ask for her to be purified. It was the kind of love that encouraged her to </span>
  <em>
    <span>rot</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p>All her past girlfriends had said she idolised them, that she put them up on a pedestal and gilded them in gold. All her past friends said that her love was a sickness, that it rotted them inside out until they couldn’t see for all the poison in their veins. Her mother once said that if someone’s love was rotten you need to burn the house down, said it with her hand on her cheek and her nails on her skin.  </p><p>So in a way, it’s only fitting she died by fire. It is a righteous thing, to burn out all the infection and leave the world better for it. Killed by an exterminator like he was some holy warrior, like he was an angel with a flaming sword sent to strike down the unbelieving.</p><p>
  <span>But Jane had believed, that was the thing. She just had been found wanting, her love never quite right. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>An exterminator had come into her house, once. She had been grateful for it at the time, but now she can’t remember why. There isn’t a home more welcoming than one filled with friends. There is nothing more beautiful than the sight of honeycombed walls, filled with the hissing press of love.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jane died a failure. Jane died with rotting flesh and honeycombed skin and still with that aching want impressed into her bones. Jane died unloved, but not alone.<br/>
</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>thank you for reading, and come find me at @lesbianbirds if you want to talk! i’m always up for chatting about jane prentiss</p></blockquote></div></div>
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